Creating the Innovative Workplace (Online Course)

Darden’s world-renowned faculty members in entrepreneurship and innovation have combined their skills in this course to help you build a workplace culture that invites creativity. Learn how to manage teams, negotiate conflict, build effective networks and strategically plan for innovation.

At a Glance

Drawing on the full range of Darden's cutting-edge research and hands-on expertise, you'll explore a variety of timely, relevant factors to unleash your workplace creativity, foster innovation and act as a catalyst for new endeavors within your organization. Expect to focus 5-8 hours per week on coursework during this five-week program.

This course allowed me to reflect about my own company innovative procedures and behaviors. We as an innovation lab considered ourselves on top of the game, however we need to walk the talk internally and this course provided a good starting point.

Wow LAB, Innovation Associate and Project Manager

Innovation requires a learning mindset, breaking old habits and discovering the unknown. This course will really open your mind to the possibilities!

Greg Abbey, Chief Marketing Officer, Steam Marketing

Course Overview

Creating a culture of innovation requires paying attention to several different variables. In this course, you'll hone your leadership skills by tackling several different topics. We'll consider tensions between short-term objectives and long-term innovations. You'll learn techniques for aligning key players and projects, balancing top-level objectives and mid-level knowledge and moving forward as a collective to make progress.

You'll also discover how successful leaders manage their personal networks, reviewing the network patterns of high performers and the traps of over- and under-connectedness. You'll learn how you can better manage conflict within your organization, and assess your own conflict-management style. You'll learn about conversations in the workplace and how to build and run high performance teams primed for innovation. Along the way you'll hear stories about building powerful workplace habits that help you manage change and innovation.

Accelerate Your Skills

Maximize the effectiveness of your professional network and your social patterns

Manage conflict to maximize potential

Create high-performing teams that are poised to innovate

Course Format

This program is conducted entirely online over the course of five weeks. Each week, participants should expect to spend approximately five to eight hours viewing instructional videos and completing field work, readings, assignments and peer evaluations. Course readings are provided within the course. No additional text required.

For the course to be completely successful, participants should maintain respectful communication with the faculty and fellow participants and comply with all applicable rules, instructions, requirements and terms of service.

Takeaways

You'll walk away from
Creating the Innovative Workplace with:

An awareness of your own conflict style and an understanding of ways to manage workplace conflict more effectively

An analysis to guide your development of a professional network that supports your goals and strengths as a leader

Strategies to energize and empower personnel and streamline resource allocation

Tools and models for designing, facilitating, and managing high-performance teams

A broadened perspective that empowers you to effect positive change and accelerate your leadership skills

Participants

This course is designed for managers and leaders who believe that innovation is everyone's business and know their organizations will benefit from fresh, powerful, and lean approaches to busting through stagnant problems. An independent but complementary training to Darden's popular
Design Thinking courses,
Creating the Innovative Workplace benefits leaders from public and private sectors alike, including those in finance, engineering, technology and administration, as well as healthcare, education and social nonprofit causes.

Faculty

Associate Professor of Business Administration
An award-winning teacher of organizational behavior, Behfar's research includes the study of group processes and performance, conflict management, group decision making, multicultural teams and cross-cultural leadership. She has provided consultation services to organizations on team and leadership effectiveness. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, and she is co-editor of the book
Conflict in Teams: New Directions in Theory and Practice. Prior to coming to Darden, Behfar was a post-doctoral fellow at the Kellogg School of Management and then a faculty member at the University of California, Irvine. She holds a Ph.D. in organizational behavior from Cornell University's Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management, as well as a Master of Science and Bachelor of Science from Boston University.

Associate Professor of Commerce, UVA McIntire School of Commerce
Professor Cross specializes in organizational behavior. He conducts research on social networks, knowledge management, organizational learning, and organizational change. Current research projects include a series of studies on the role of social networks in knowledge creation and sharing, a functional theory of work-based relations, assessment of the role of trust in knowledge exchange, modeling cultural consensus as a product of social network position, and emerging work on the role of energy in social networks. Professor Cross directs research into social network analysis for The Network Roundtable. He publishes articles in academic and professional journals, presents papers at scholarly and practitioner conferences, and participates in executive education programs. A book by Professor Cross and A. Parker,
The Hidden Power of Social Networks: Understanding How Work Really Gets Done in Organizations, was published in 2004 by Harvard Business School Press.

Killgallon Ohio Art Professor of Business Administration; Senior Fellow, Olsson Center for Applied Ethics
Horniman has been training ethical, mindful leaders for more than 45 years. His "Leading, Learning and Change" framework has inspired thousands to think differently about how they lead and influence others. A behavioral psychology and leadership specialist, he is the founding director of the Darden Olsson Center for Applied Ethics. Horniman served in the U.S. Army and as a special consultant to U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and has prior experience in the aviation industry. He holds a D.B.A. from Harvard Business School.

Professor of Business Administration and Batten Executive-in-Residence
Prior to joining academia, Professor Hess spent more than 20 years in the business world as a senior executive. He is the author of 12 books, over 100 articles and over 60 Darden cases, etc. dealing with growth, innovation and learning cultures, systems and processes. His books include
Humility Is the New Smart: Rethinking Human Excellence In the Smart Machine Age(Berrett- Kohler, 2017) and
Learn or Die: Using Science to Build a Leading-Edge Learning Organization(Columbia Business School Publishing, September 2014). He consults regularly with major public and private companies.

Associate Professor of Business Administration
Jeremy Hutchison-Krupat's research is focused on the effective implementation of a firm's innovation strategy. His recent work has evaluated the effect that various resource allocation processes have on a firm's ability to innovate, the appropriate use of different performance metrics for collaborative innovation, and the effect of both incentives and tolerance for failure on managerial decision making within an innovation context. This research is supported by grants from the Batten Institute at the University of Virginia.

United Technologies Corporation Professor of Business Administration
Jeanne M. Liedtka is the former chief learning officer at United Technologies Corporation, a Fortune 50 corporation, where she was responsible for overseeing corporate learning and development. At Darden, Jeanne works with both MBAs and executives in the areas of design thinking, innovation and
leading growth. Her current research focuses on design-led innovation in the government and social sector, as does her forthcoming book,
Designing for the Greater Good. She authored
The Designing for Growth Field Book: A Step by Step Guide (2014), The Catalyst: How You Can Lead Extraordinary Growth, which was one of
Bloomberg Businessweek' s best innovation books of 2009;
Designing for Growth, which was named the best management book of 2011 by 800-CEO-READ; and
Solving Problems with Design Thinking: 10 Stories of What Works.

Tuition & Specialization

Tuition for this course is $395. Payment is required in advance of the program and is not refundable or transferable after the start of the program.

SPECIAL OFFER: Bundle Pricing

If you pre-register for all four courses in the specialization by 5 January 2018, you'll receive a special bundle price for your Specialization of $1,200, which is an overall savings of $380. To take advantage of this limited time offer, please contact Brandi Shifflett (
shifflettb@darden.virginia.edu) to receive your special discount code to use at registration. Please note specific rules and policies for this promotion:

No refunds, including any online courses previously taken

Registration is required for all four courses at once for the special pricing to apply

All four courses must be completed by June 2018. We recommend you take
Design Thinking Part I and
Creating the Innovative Workplace simultaneously in order to complete your specialization by June 2018.

Design Thinking Part I and
Design Thinking Part II may not be taken simultaneously

Policies & Procedures/FAQs

Registration: You can register for any of the online courses by completing a registration form directly from the course page on our website. Payment is due upon registration. We accept payment online from American Express, MasterCard and Visa. You'll receive a confirmation email after we receive your registration. Registration for each course closes on the course start date. We offer a 10% tuition reduction for groups of 10 or more.
Email us for approval and pricing.

Cancellations & Transfers: If you must cancel your enrollment, you must do so within seven (7) calendar days of the course start date. Please
email us with the name of the course, followed by "cancellation" in the subject line. If you cancel or withdraw within seven (7) days of the start date, you will be refunded 100% of your tuition. No refunds will be permitted after the first seven (7) days of the course.

If you prefer, you may transfer to one subsequent course offered within one year, if available.
Email us with the name of the course, followed by "transfer" in the subject line. This request must be made within seven (7) calendar days after the original course start date.

Access to Course Materials: Each of the four courses is designed to run for five (5) weeks. We leave each course open for a full ten (10) weeks. Once a course is closed, you will not be able to access our lectures and course materials, information pages, or assignments (including peer feedback). You may continue to access your network, submissions, discussions, conversations, and team workspace in archive mode (no new posts or comments) for up to six (6) months.

For more information,
review a complete list of our online course policies and procedures, as well as frequently asked questions.